A couple years back, I wrote about the evil that is the Bank of America. I get a fair amount of search engine hits for people searching out the bank. A chunk of those get here by combining the word SUCK with the full name of the bank, since my little work was entitled, “Bank of America can suck me.”
I think it’s not a coincidence that sucking and banking lead a stream of folks here. People like “Iris” who recently commented and included a link to http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/360/RipOff0360292.htm. I do believe she’s a real live human, not a spambot, and I do believe BofA has fucked her, too.
The timing of her comment is special to me, even if a spambot, because of what arrived in the regular, old mailbox to which the U.S. Postal Service delivers in the real world the very same day.
Here’s the dealio — I previously wrote about despite depositing a rather healthy six-figure chunk of cash into their vaults, becoming a quote-unquote VIP depositor and then being given the VIP anal raping of overdraft fees and a cunt-filled customer service experience. Bottom line, I thought “fuck this bullshit,” yanked my dough out and moved along.
In customer service bullshit land, they wouldn’t let me close the account completely without going to the branch of the bank, and through laziness and inertia I just left enough in the base account to cover anything that I might have missed that could still be outstanding and forgot about it. I still used the BofA Visa, which they encouraged and pretty much insisted upon with my opening of my very first account. I use it every now and again, usually when I can’t use American Express.
So, for the last couple of years nothing much happened. Then, about four months ago, I think, they started slapping on some maintenance fees, and slowly my few buck bank account became a deficit spending on fees account. The rolled up all of the fees and deficit spending, plus some random amount more, and they went ahead and took that amount from the Visa, which now served as my overdraft protection.
I checked the credit card bill, expecting a $50 dinner or two, and had an extra hundred buck charge. This time I called, and I meant business. Zero that motherfucker out, take my name off and go fuck your bad selves. I didn’t even want to fight the ridiculous fees, calculating it was my penance for slothful stupidity and not taking care of it sooner.
On that closing call, I spoke for the very first time in my Bank of America relationship to a human, a man who seemed to have not just a pulse and a soul but more than a few brain cells and IQ points. He seemed to get why I might hate them and want no further association. But, as these things go in this modern world, he had a script to try to get me to stay, and he had a manager (or some other tier of handing the phone over help) to whom he had to turf my call so she could try to convince me to stay.
A good slice of time I was on hold and then she kept at me for a trying period of minutes wasted for me. In good natured exasperation, I walked her through everything I experienced as a hypothetical, I asked her questions and, finally, I asked her to walk in my shoes and decide what she would do. A couple of minutes later we worked out where I could transfer the amount they over-grabbed from overdraft protecting and put into BACK my account to pay the credit card bill, and we called it a day. Closed. Done.
But, back to Iris and her comment and why it made my day.
In the mail that day, in a #10 business envelope without any logos and a generic corporate-American-business-return address, I got a little bit of Bank of America correspondence. Because of my having been late in paying the balance on my credit card because of the amount THEY took and PUT IN MY BANK ACCOUNT without telling me, I got charged a fee. No surprise. But the correspondence reported, they were dropping my credit limit on my Visa down from about $10K to $500, that’s five hundred fucking dollars down from several more zeroes.
Let me ponder. A coincidence that my credit is being reduced on a card I’ve had for about four years because of “late payments,” noting, of course, this wasn’t the first ever late payment, it wasn’t that late, and they steadily pushed up my limit, right when I finally close my “V. I. fucking P. account? I think not.
I’ll await the dinging to my credit reports and just thank the fates that I’m not shopping for loans at the moment. To summarize, Bank of American can suck me.
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